R/C Tech Forums - View Single Post - HPI's new F1
Thread: HPI's new F1
View Single Post
Old 12-19-2010, 04:39 PM
  #913  
gashuffer
Tech Champion
iTrader: (48)
 
gashuffer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: RcVille
Posts: 5,230
Trader Rating: 48 (100%+)
Default

Originally Posted by vafactor
Mine was the lone HPI F-1 at the Indoor Champs. And yes, it had 1/10th scale pancar tires on it. It's also true that my HPI car, even with it's WGT tires was not quite the equal of the 3 pancar conversions that were in attendence. My reasons for putting pancar wheels on my HPI F1 car were:

A) I thought about getting a Corally F1 and making life easy on myself. But doing that just didn't quite "feel" right since most would agree that the Corally is a chassis with a distinct performance advantage over any traditional F1 car. In the interest of "fairness" I chose a more traditional (and inexpensive) F1 platform. But the HPI comes set up only for rubber tires, and Cleveland was a foam tire race. Hmmmm, what to do?
B) I quickly found that pancar tires are easy to obtain. F1 tires are hard to find, and the selection of compounds is limited.
C) WGT tires are just over half the cost of F1 specific mounted foamies. That savings a big deal to a cheap guy such as myself.
D) pancar tires are available in a variety of compounds that are good for tuning.
E) I needed to convert the F1 car to run with foams somehow, and it turned out to be less expensive to get a WGT axle than to get a specific foam tire F1 axle and diff from HPI.
F) I thought that the car would work better on high grip surfaces with low profile tires anyway.

Since Cleveland, I've found that most clubs tend to frown on the use of pancar tires on the F1 cars. Bummer. Now I've got a decent handling cheap F1 car with no place to run it. I find this odd considering that most of the more competitive F1 pilots are still using F103 cars. Sadly, those are no longer available. If the F104's were competitive, I'd get one and run it. But, judging from what I've seen at every venue where I've been, the faster "traditional" F1 cars are all F103's. It does strike me as curious that same guys who frown on others running a cheap and available car, enjoy the performance advantage of still running discontinued cars that cannot be had at any price. If there's to be an online discussion of fairness in the F1 arena, where's the fairness in that? If pancar tires are to be disallowed in the F1 club racing arena, perhaps unavailable cars should also be disallowed.

Just food for thought from an F1 outsider who's looking in.
103's can still be had. You just have to search for them and parts are still available. 104W is definitly a great handling car too.
My quam is link vs t-plate. My opinion on link cars is you might as well run WGT. Formula 1 is not supposed to be a crazy fast class. I think?
gashuffer is offline